Monday, October 24, 2011

Do you read "The New Yorker?"

ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT RISKO

If you don't, you should. It's some of the best writing and storytelling out there. Even the letters to the editor are well written.
I also appreciate that they don't treat hip-hop poorly and that they spend time examining it. Like in this piece last year about Jay-Z and Decoded.

And please take the time to read this piece about the economics of Sept. 11. Here's an excerpt:

The events of September 11th, as grim as they were, offered the prospect of employment to a generation of working-class Americans who were born too late for good factory jobs. If the Bush Administration’s “global war on terror” had gone the way of the Second World War, mass mobilization in the armed forces, combined with mass production in the factories, would have revitalized a stagnant national economy and produced a postwar boom. This didn’t happen. Without a draft, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought by less than one per cent of the population. The Pentagon, which wanted to keep those wars limited and short, avoided planning for large-scale manufacturing, even after its necessity became obvious. In 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was questioned by a scout from the Tennessee National Guard about the lack of quality armor for his unit’s trucks. “You go to war with the army you have,” Rumsfeld replied. Even after this remark became infamous, the production of armor proceeded slowly, almost grudgingly, and troops and vehicles remained dangerously exposed for years. Most new defense jobs at home turned out to be in data collection and intelligence, which required college degrees and specialized knowledge, or in the low-paying realm of airport and building security.

But the main reason that 9/11 didn’t become a source of jobs, or of ideas for revitalizing the economy, was that the country wasn’t thinking about its own weaknesses. President George W. Bush defined his era in terms of war, and the public largely saw it the same way. September 11th was a tragedy that, in the years that followed, tragically consumed the nation’s attention.

I'm a long time reader and the best thing they could have done was create their iPad app because now I subscribe to that, which saves trees as well as gives me access to extra bells and webzy whistles.
I get so much Sunday joy from my New Yorker. Get you some.